When comparing LÖVE vs GameSalad, the Slant community recommends LÖVE for most people. In the question“What are the best 2D game engines?”LÖVE is ranked 2nd while GameSalad is ranked 55th. The most important reason people chose LÖVE is:

Lua is an embeddable scripting language designed to be lightweight, fast yet powerful. It is used in major titles such as Civilization as well as a lot of indie games.
Lua is very popular because it provides "meta language" features. You can implement object-oriented structures, or pure procedural functions, etc. It has a very simple C interface, and gives the engine developer a lot of flexibility in the language itself.
Artists tend to love Lua too because it's very approachable, with plain and forgiving syntax.
Lua is free open-source software, distributed under a very liberal license (the well-known MIT license).

Pros

Pro

Uses the fantastic Lua for scripting

Lua is an embeddable scripting language designed to be lightweight, fast yet powerful. It is used in major titles such as Civilization as well as a lot of indie games.

Lua is very popular because it provides "meta language" features. You can implement object-oriented structures, or pure procedural functions, etc. It has a very simple C interface, and gives the engine developer a lot of flexibility in the language itself.

Artists tend to love Lua too because it's very approachable, with plain and forgiving syntax.

Lua is free open-source software, distributed under a very liberal license (the well-known MIT license).

Pro

Active and very friendly community

The LÖVE forums are extremely helpful. With people checking the forums every day, it won't take long to receive answer to your questions on the Support board, receive feedback on games you post in the Projects board, as well as have a chat about the LÖVE engine while learning tricks to use in the very active General board.

If you need an immediate answer though, or just want to chat, there is a very active and helpful IRC channel.

Pro

Cross-platform

Supports Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Android and iOS.

Pro

Great for prototyping

You can learn the basics very quickly and start making simple games in no time, even if you have no previous Lua knowledge. If you're a little experienced with LÖVE, you can prototype a 2D game with it in no time.

Pro

Open source and free

The LÖVE engine is licensed under The zlib/libpng License (which is very short and human readable) which allows you to use the source code and even modify it as long as you do not claim that the original source code is yours.

You can obtain the code at this bitbucket repository and even help fix bugs and participate in the development of LÖVE.

Pro

Easy to understand and use

Lua2D handles loading the resources, reading input, playing sounds and displaying stuff on the screen. Only the logic is left for the developer to write. It also removes the overhead of having to use and learn a GUI game editor. All you need is a knowledge of Lua and your favourite text editor or IDE.

Pro

Very good documentation

The LÖVE wiki provides full documentation of its easy to use Modules, which are conveniently located on the side bar of the wiki. It only takes seconds to find the module for love.keyboard, which provided a list of all functions along with arguments and examples where the function could be used.

Pro

Many examples and libraries with source code

There are plenty of open source examples of games or components built by the community that are ready to use or learn from.

Pro

Can develop within Android

It is possible to develop games directly on a tablet or cellphone with the Android system by using the experimental Android branch.

Pro

Very good for education

That is a great tool for teaching novice programmers. Creating a game on LÖVE, you have to think about developing, not about the syntax of the language.

Pro

Cute name

So much love.

Pro

C++ and Lua one of the best languages for gamedev

Because all professionals in gamedev use C++, and Lua the fastest scripting lang.

Pro

Cross-Platform

Pro

No-code editor

Pro

Has a Windows(.exe) version on par with Mac

The Windows version is now upto date with all the features of its Mac sibling.

Pro

Multiple publishing platforms

Pro

Gamepad support

Gamepad support is available as of 0.13.3.

Pro

Free standalone viewer app allows instant, live mobile device testing

The GameSalad Viewer is a free app available for iOS, Android and Kindle. Once installed on your mobile devices, you can deploy and test your GameSalad games live on any mobile device running the Viewer that is on the same local network as your dev computer.

This even allows Windows users to test their games on iOS devices without a Mac device and without any complicated code signing or provisioning profiles.

And, you can even take your games with you -- once loaded onto your mobile device, a history option caches recent games on your device without any connection to the dev computer.

Pro

Allows you to focus on the logic rather than code

Since the user mainly uses menu options there is very little code needed to be keyed in. This makes the code very easy to read and understand.Hence there are many help videos on youtube

Pro

Extensive community of seasoned professionals for support

Extensive community of seasoned professionals in all disciplines (graphics, game design, animation, physics, music, video production, marketing, etc.) producing tutorials, videos, publishing tips, free templates and who are willing to answer forum questions and help newcomers.

Pro

Powerful expression editor and functions

Allows you to create expressions on par with LUA (it's back end-language).

Pro

Custom collision shapes with JSON support

Allows you to import JSON data for custom collision shapes to use with Gamesalad's implementation of Box2d physics.

Pro

Easy to publish

Software prepares your app so you can just send it to Apple. All my games are reviewed with no problems.

Pro

Drag and drop editor

The drag and drop editor makes GameSalad very easy to use, no programming experience needed.

Pro

Great engine

Very quick to learn and great for making games. Community is very open and helpful.

Cons

Con

Not very powerful

The engine has very few modules and only the really required one, you'll have to do almost everything from scratch.

Con

The community seems juvenile

For example, some of the library include names such as HUMP, LUBE, AnAL.

Con

Documentation is very dry and technical

The site has plenty of tutorials, true, but they all read very technical, and explain very little. This might be too much for beginners, even for coding purposes, because of the fact that the specifics aren't explained well enough to learn effectively. The docs can be found frustrating to understand even the basics, such as tables or the like, because of how poorly they are explained, and how few examples are given before expecting you to be able to use them.

Con

Absolutely no GUI (no graphical interface)

This has no graphical interface at all, you have to know how to read script in order to know what you're looking at. After you've written the script for everything, you compile it to see the result. It's a very poor way to create a game, given how even most professional tools out there give you a GUI to work with and debug on the go. The lack of a GUI slows down the work by ten-fold, and it's just an inefficient use of your time.

Con

Poor editor performance

Especially when you're working on a big project.

Con

No scripting language or SDK

If a needed behavior is not supplied by GameSalad, there's no way to add it.

Con

Product is suffering - Lacking company leadership and no voice from corporate

Some customers are currently in a holding pattern from the lack of support and messaging from GS corporate. GS is currently unstable and developers are waiting for another update that has been going on from 2015.No word or message from GS corporate about timeframes or deliverables.

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